The MX Moment: Introduction
The MX Moment
Exploring Cold War History and Democratic Futures in the Nuclear West
Introduction: Great Basin
Great Basin Memories
What constitutes a human sense of place? At first glance, a definition seems readily at hand, but as soon it is reached for the elusive shiftiness of place reveals itself. Much like the environment that sustains us, place is a dynamic and evolving thing. Place as a construct is a seething tumult pushed by new experience and new knowledge that persistently illuminate previously unexplored areas for interrogation. Place bears the marks of history and the potential for change. Identifying place is a human act. Making it meaningful and marking the boundaries that need to be defended as an extension of oneself is a political one.
It is with thoughts such as these that I begin to consider my own evolving sense of place for this Great Basin environment that I call home. It is an evolution that has moved me from an ignorant ambivalence to avid promoter, from passive gawker to hopeful protector. The first specific memories are drawn from the annual family treks we would make on Interstate 80 from my hometown of Salt Lake City to Reno, Nevada. My father loved cars and the reason for our annual excursion was to attend the Hot August Nights car show and swap meet.
Hot and August are synonymous in the Great Basin. The highest of the major North American deserts, it is an environment that tends to dabble in extremes. Aerial imagery reveals a low basin and high mountain range patterns that ripples across the landscape from the jagged western tide of the Sierra-Nevada to the fault blocked shores of the eastern Wasatch front. The forces at work here have the look of massive earthen waves (a reality of the tectonic and geothermal pressures generated as the Pacific shelf collides with the North American crust). The effects of time and energy push basin and range mountains up and into varying degrees of uplift.
As its name implies, the defining feature of this place is the hydrologic anomaly of numerous interconnected low basin valleys, and high mountain range districts that guard what small amount of water that enters the region jealously, refusing it access to the sea. The scant moisture that does fall here tends to run its course out into dry lakebed playas, or ominous sinks, before the heat of evaporation claims the lighter hydrogen and oxygen molecules (leaving only heavy salts and minerals behind). Where the name “Great Basin” fails is in implying that this activity takes place within a giant vessel. Rather, the shape of the region more generally resembles that of a giant upturned bowl, higher at its center than on its margins, and scarred throughout with a steady pattern of north/south trending valleys and mountains. The extreme aridity in turn drives the rhythms and cycles of life here, creating valley floors that typically remain flat and littered with stands of low plants like sagebrush and cheat grass. The mountain ranges of the Great Basin, which climb as high as the 13,064 summit of Wheeler Peak, are effectively cut off from one another by a series of low, broad valleys. Each mountain range, in turn, becomes its own individual islands of biota and vegetation.
My earliest memories of our family trips into this desert expanse have no ties to the geology or geography however, but are instead earmarked with all too human moments spent with my family. I remember the air-conditioning on the family Ford Escort giving out mid-vacation, and my parents deciding to leave the spectacle of Reno under the cover of darkness, so as to avoid a nine-hour trip under the August sun. I remember my dad excitedly insisting that we make an unscheduled trip to the National Automobile Museum along the Truckee River after he learned that their temporary exhibit featured the Rat Fink artwork of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. On every trip my parents would reminisce about the day in late May 1975 when they decided to trek to Reno and begin their life as a married couple. Any sense of the Great Basin that I carried in these formative years of life was of a vast, unimaginably empty space that simply needed to be crossed over.
It wasn’t until my early adolescence that I had an experience with the Great Basin environment that still resonates. The moment came during another sweltering August in the desert. Heading west on Interstate 80, shortly before arriving at the town of Elko a highway roadblock that had been hastily erected brought the family hatchback to a halt. As we sat and waited in unexpected gridlock a highway patrol trooper approached our vehicle. I remember my father rolling down the window and the trooper informing us that due to a major accident further down the road the Interstate had been closed. All traffic was being diverted south onto the lightly traveled Highway 50. The officer indicated that it would be wise to consider gassing up in Elko, as the miles and road tend to get long and the towns in between distant inside the rugged basin and range providence of central Nevada.
Leaving Elko our road turned south and then eventually west once we hit the junction with Highway 50. Formerly known as the Lincoln Highway, this stretch earned its moniker “the Loneliest Road” from a July, 1986 Life Magazine article. The towns that exist along the road have embraced this slogan, and have even started a marketing campaign around it. And while there are assuredly lonelier roads to be found on this planet, things in the rugged interior of Nevada remain fairly desolate.
Shortly before arriving in the town of Eureka we passed the site that has left a lasting impact on my perception of Great Basin desert. Sitting ominously empty under a relentless desert sun sat an abandoned vehicle, presumably left by owners who were forced to walk or hitchhike to Eureka for gasoline. This suspicion was confirmed when we arrived in the tiny community and were greeted by the site of a massive line of cars parked, waiting to gain access to the only gas station in the town. This moment left me feeling haunted. I had no trouble imagining the horror of abandoning the relative safety of our vehicle, only to be swallowed whole by the extremes of a desert void.
I reflect on this moment and understand that it imparted something deep that still resonates in my gut, a crucial lesson of humility for the things in this world that exist outside of human understanding or planning. In the ensuing years, I have tried to expand my own experience and knowledge of this place that might provide a cogent articulation to this feeling. The Great Basin has come to serve as a potent reminder that while the human constructs of place inform and guide most of my daily living, there are places on this planet that supersede such artificial boundary lines. These are places that cannot be reasoned or argued with, offering concrete reminders that rhythms of planet invariably dominate the concerns of human beings. The Great Basin is a reminder that while place can be traced and imagined any full accounting of its staggering complexity will always remain firmly outside the full range of human understanding. No wonder that in a space that offers so much potential cognitive dissonance, the human animal has struggled so desperately to leave marks on the landscape (both for good and for bad).
Great Basin Maps
The history of human activity in the Great Basin reinforces the view that it is a place human beings have simultaneously imbued with sacred significance, as well as a pernicious anxiety that has too often left it open for exploitation. William Fox argues that this latter tendency is born of the deep fear and anxiety that emerges from our particular evolutionary circumstances. In effect, Fox suggests that the environmental features that make the Great Basin so indelible, (such as horizons that roll on seemingly forever) has left human beings in a position of reflexive anxiety in dealing with it.
However, this assessment does run into conflict with clear evidence that demonstrates human beings marking this place as home for thousands of years. Ancestors of the modern day Great Basin tribes, including the Western Shoshones, Paiutes, and Goshutes reveal an equally powerful human ability to bend the currents of culture to suit nearly any Earthly environment, even one with rigidly tight margins such as the Great Basin.
Living within the tight margins offered by the Great Basin has born a particular set of demographic realities for those who have historically made the Great Basin home. The most obvious of these realities are the low population densities that exist throughout the vast region, usually clustered around any small water source that manifests with any degree of consistency. Until the middle-19th century large population centers were risky in an area of such low aridity.
Because of such extremes, the Great Basin remained the least explored and least mapped portion of the early Spanish Empire. With the advance of new expeditions beginning with the Corp of Discovery expedition headed by Lewis and Clark between 1804 and 1806, new insights into the region would slowly emerge. These insights were manifest into reality of sort through the production of maps. Cartography has an implicit political dimension, as the acts of rendering and naming are often part and parcel with the act of possessing. The maps of the early western cartographers became new (and potentially devastating) tools in helping underwrite a particular form of invasive Westward expansion rooted in a belief in divine providence for westward expansion known as Manifest Destiny.
With these explorations into the former Spanish Empire a series of overland trails were established. These routes would become vital in spreading the American government and its people over the landscape, in effect creating the vanguard for massive social, and massive environmental change through a process historian Alfred Crosby refers to as ecological imperialism.
Perhaps the most vivid example of the transformative effects of ecological imperialism can be seen on the high plains of the Midwest. With the influx of Americans in the 19th century through both westward expansion and homesteading efforts the region was transformed from a place of high grasslands to the nation’s breadbasket of industrialized agriculture and vast fields of grain and corn mono-culture. The bison populations of the Great Plains are the most vivid example of a non-human species being pushed to the brink of extinction with the growth of cities and railroads, as well as the systematic efforts to exterminate them. Similarly the Indian populations of the High Plains and their cultures were decimated through both conflicts with encroaching white populations as well as by the massive death brought on by exposure to new diseases of European descent. The drama and trauma of such comprehensive change wasn’t unique to just the Midwest, as the early Mormon vanguard into the Great Basin offers a comparable portrait of marks upon the landscape.
When Mormon pioneers first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 they were not carrying the flag of freedom and western expansion for the United States. Rather, laboring under an intense feeling of alienation and religious persecution early Mormons were intentionally seeking a place outside of the still expanding US borders. They were looking for a place in which to practice their religion and set about building the type of theocratic government they felt necessary for ushering in God’s final days of wrath and judgment. These historic realities stand in stark contrast to the politics of the modern day faith, which has actively cultivated a strong sense of nationalism among its membership in the 20th century.
The early Mormons in Salt Lake, led by Brigham Young, established their first major Great Basin refuge in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Early interactions with the indigenous groups of the region were paternalistic on the part of the Mormon, but marked by the same sorts of distinct theological teachings that had gained attention (and often animosity) in former settlements at Kirtland, Ohio and Nauvoo, Illinois. Mormon belief held that in the latter-days Indians would play a crucial role as a “hammer of the Lord” in helping to forge millennial realities.
Central to the story of change initiated by Mormon settlement and agriculture is the early reclamation efforts that attempted to control the small amounts of water available. Water was (and is) crucial to survival in the Great Basin. Early Mormon attempts to dam and redirect watercourses for the improvement of agriculture served as one of the first models for a human activity that would come to mark and reshape the western U.S. in the 20th century. Mormon reclamation was one stage of an evolution in thought and practice, which has had a profound effect on western waters.
Eventually the bending of natural processes to meet human demands was allied with the (often brutal) efficiencies of industry. When this powerful apparatus was married to the legal and political power of government in the early 20th century, full born Western reclamation took shape and its consequences have been profound. Devastated ecosystems and population booms throughout the western region are two of the steep prices paid for reclamation activity that simultaneously fueled American economic growth, as well as the growth of government and a vast military-industrial complex, in the 20th century.
The complex patterns of human activity in the Great Basin reveal an almost mystical ability that the place has to inspire grandiosity, whether it takes the shape of monumental land art by the likes of Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, or the guise of nation building such as the unprecedented military-industrial activities that will be a central focus of this work.
A Project on Place
The monumental landscape art that has emerged in the Great Basin, situated as closely as it is to various zones of sacrifice offered up in tribute to the needs of an expanding latter 20th century military, reflect the myriad ways beyond words that human beings have attempted to understand the Great Basin as place. And yet, words are both intimately human and vitally important. Words cannot capture the full story and yet they are our primary method for connecting and sharing with one another. Words carry the weight of culture and fuel the narratives of history. Words hold power to motivate and initiate actions that can build up or tear down. The project that follows is fundamentally rooted in exploring the power words have in shaping place.
Shortly after completing my undergraduate studies in 2002, I stumbled into a job at the Utah State Archives. Stumbled is the appropriate word here, as the work I was hired to perform wasn’t anything for which I had any formal training or specialized knowledge. My task was to take the records created by the office of Utah Governor, Scott Matheson, uncover the contexts in which they were created, impose an intellectual order on them, and create a set of finding aids that would make the records accessible to the public. Almost immediately my attention was seized by something with the sinister title of “MX.” Reading the correspondence and assorted records in the Matheson collection I quickly learned that “MX” was shorthand for an experimental missile system that the US Air Force hoped to construct in the heart of the Great Basin. Pouring over the historic record I was continually struck by the passion (and words) that the MX proposition inspired in Utah citizens. I was moved by the deep histories of hurt and loss born of decades of military abuse on the state. As work progressed I learned that there were even more unprocessed records in the Archives permanent collection documenting the history of MX in Utah. I kept a small reminder on my desk in the form of a Post-It note to return to the records should time and circumstance ever allow.
Years later, when assessing my research interests and options as a graduate student in the Environmental Humanities program my attention returned again to the haunting words of MX that I had read in those constituent letters to Governor Matheson years before. My mind still dwelled on the passionate articulations of love and understanding of place, and the unique ways of life and culture born and refined there. In this context I proposed the idea of utilizing the skills ten years of archival work had gifted me and marrying them with the insights and methodologies born of my graduate studies. It is a project that has consumed me from the first day of 2012.
What follows is a product born of this academic and professional merging. The year of 2012 began with a thorough survey of the permanent collection of the Utah State Archives, seeking out the full measure of dusty MX records that had remained untouched and unprocessed in the years since their creation. The year of 2012 draws to an end with me attempting to synthesize what I learned from the MX record and convey it within the larger context of abuse that defines the connected western zones of sacrifice that have been labeled the Nuclear West..
But just as the MX idea didn’t fall out of the sky or exist in a vacuum, a simple retelling of what I found in the historic record seems inadequate. MX was clearly born into a much larger context of nuclear culture on the landscape. Accordingly, this will be a story told through a woven narrative, one which incorporates both the history of MX as it manifests in the records I have processed, as well as the narratives from my own field work and experiences spent visiting crucial sites in the larger Nuclear West. These field studies will be used to gain a foothold into a series of specific issues that reveal several crucial component pieces of the MX story.
What follows is an investigation of language and the power that words play in both defining and politicizing place. This project will attempt an interrogation of the ideas and assumptions upon which these words are built, and how those ideas manifest in culture and on the landscape. It will be an investigation of who is offering a particular narrative and the potential justifications for doing so. This work will attempt to convey the vital role that history plays in informing our worldview and assess the contested nature of politicized spaces on the Nuclear West map. Finally, this work will address the challenges and opportunities of practicing informed democracy, and making problematic decisions in an increasingly complicated world.
Chapter one begins with a trip to the mesa north of Santa Fe, New Mexico where the lab at Los Alamos was established, and the theoretical work that ushered in a new age was born. This is followed by a trip to the dusty Jornada Del Muerto desert and White Sands Missile Range to visit the Trinity site. This narrative allows for a juxtaposition of the wonder and love for nature so often described by the early atomic scientists at Los Alamos and the industrial and mechanistic language that had become the norm with military co-opting by the time of MX. This moment also provides an opportunity to explore the Manhattan Project and the bold changes it elicited in how government and military covert operations function, while also providing a venue to explore how those actions look in the light of US Air Force planning and action for the MX. Finally, the strict rigid control held over the Trinity site provides a valuable opportunity to analyze political control of nuclear spaces and the forms of recurring narrative threads that are often born in such places.
In chapter two my nuclear narrative turns toward the lonely windswept desert that contains the Wendover Air Field. The activity that began in the Great Salt Lake Desert in 1944 provides dramatic examples of military co-opting and valuing of western space. The aerial image that was a hallmark of military activity in Wendover serves as a means of assessing the technological changes born of an expanding military-industrial culture and its eventual spread into all corners of American life. The road to the Wendover Airfield allows for a meditation on the deep human history that helps explain some of the view and treatment of the Great Basin. And finally, the growth witnessed at Wendover grants an opportunity to look at the potential social ramifications that would have come with MX, and how the feared loss of traditional ways of living in small towns gave a particular resonance to the dynamic opposition that rose up in chorus against MX after its announcement by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
My next destination in chapter three will move further south and into the hauntingly surreal space of the Nevada Test Site. As MX could not have existed without the insights and specialization born of weapons testing, the NTS is a crucial site on any map of the Nuclear West. The issues raised here will include the evolving nuclear sublime that emerged at the site. The ongoing controversy and debate over the treatment of land at the NTS from the view of the Western Shoshone also provides another opportunity to explore voices from the opposition, and attempt to uncover how these varied rhetorical appeals played out against the logic of military planners pushing a national security imperative. The deep level of distrust born of the downwinder story and the Nevada Test Site will also be mined to provide a historical framework for the moment of distrust into which MX was proposed. Finally, the visit to NTS, and the interpretive history given will allow for a continued exploration of the politics of nuclear places, and how contested these areas become.
The final chapter will journey near the U.S./Mexican border, to the site of the Titan Missile Museum. As the only remaining Titan Missile silo, this site allows for a deeper exploration of the nuclear and Cold War logic that produced ICBM’s into which the MX missile was an evolutionary successor. The abandoned Titan site again allows for an observation of how the politics of nuclear space play out while also providing a unique opportunity to explore the cultural impact of living in a nuclear world, with all of its assorted debris scattered across the landscape. Finally, the Titan allows me to ask questions concerning the inevitability of obsolescence and the implications that would have had in the context of the MX missile, readily advertised at the time as the largest construction project in human history.
My conclusion will return again to the western edge of the Nevada Test Site and explore the uncanny parallels that run between the failed MX missile system and Yucca Mountain. I will take this opportunity to both examine the particular forms of rhetoric (both pro and con) that appears at both sites, as well as the assumptions that underwrite them. This conclusion will provide the opportunity to delve deeper into the importance of historic record and the role it plays in government transparency, as well as the need for clear and complete information in making decisions in an unsure and difficult future. Whether access to complete information enlightens us and ensures a robust and dynamic democracy and informed dialogue, or whether it alienates and changes the map and our behavior to more closely fit the needs and demands of larger institutional forces will be considered.
Reminders of Secret Spaces
While working on the project that follows, I found myself needing to escape a sense of deepening confinement that was growing in my daily city routine. My wife, Sarah, and I decided to once again head west on the same I-80 road I remember well from my childhood. Arriving in Elko, we once again made the turn off and headed south, into the early autumn solitude of the Ruby Mountains. The Rubies are one more surprise in a place that is seemingly full of them. High and jagged, the plant growth here is tundra and more akin to what one might find in the Rocky Mountains of Montana or Colorado than the middle of the Great Basin. They are an anomaly on the landscape, both in their shape and owing to the fact that in spite of the massive rain shadow cast by the Sierra Nevada, the Rubies still manage to pull as much moisture from passing clouds as might be expected from ranges in the Rockies further east.
Settling into my camp chair to write after a morning hike I was suddenly startled by the low roar of an engine that felt too close and too powerful. Moments later a heavy military transport plane strafed the mountains over our heads, flying low enough that I could make out its identification numbers in clear detail. Pointed west, I could only conjecture that it was making the trip from Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, or possibly the airstrip at the Dugway Proving Grounds to one of the myriad secret military spots that dot the western landscape.
The moment was all too symbolic for me, a dynamic reminder that the quiet solitude of a place I love exists dynamically alongside an entrenched network of secret spaces and military installations that have marked and changed it in profound and important ways. The place I love is also a place that knowledge and experience has also taught me to fear. What follows is my attempt to better understand that fear, and articulate what is lost by simply ignoring the secret map that overlays my Great Basin home. This is a project born out of love and passion for place. It is with the unique tools and insights born of my own experience that I now set out to deepen the knowledge and passion that will underwrite all future attempts I make to stand and protect it.
Sources
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.
Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Fiero, Bill. Geology of the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986.
Fox, William. Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002.
Francaviglia, Richard V. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin: A Cartographic History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005.
Kuletz, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Trimble, Stephen. The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999.
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.